From paying for news to trust in public service media, there was plenty to unpack in this year’s Digital News Report.

In the wake of the release of the Digital News Report: Australia 2023, PIJI spoke to Professor Sora Park, one of the authors of the report and a member of PIJI’s Expert Research Panel.

Park spoke in more depth about some of the report’s key findings and what they mean for local public interest news producers.

Listen to the full interview below, or scroll down to read the transcript.

Transcript

Following is a transcript of the conversation between PIJI’s Danielle Kutchel and Professor Sora Park.

Sora

My name is Sora Park, professorial research fellow at the News and Media Research Centre. And my research mainly is around news audiences and media industries.

Danielle

Can I ask and this is a little bit off topic, but I’m just curious to know, how did you get into that? What prompted you to get into that?

Sora

I was always interested in audience studies. And it ranges from TV audiences, news audiences, online users. They’re the main research area and news audiences is relatively a recent passion, because I’ve been working with this project, the digital news report for nine years now. So naturally, I acquired more interest in studying specifically news audiences.

Danielle 

What do you want news producers and news outlets to take from this research? What do you want them to do with the findings that you’ve found?

Sora 

Well, one of the surprising findings this year was that there’s a widening gap between men and women in their interest in news, their trust in news, and overall consumption of news. And that I think that speaks to a lot of things that are happening in the news industry at the moment that everyone’s struggling to expand their audience, meet the needs of younger audiences, but perhaps they’re missing out on what women want and need from news.

Danielle

I did want to look into those findings on women. That, for me, as a woman was was really concerning. What what do you think it’s down to, because they’ve lost trust in news, they’ve lost interest in news. They’re not accessing news as much on most forums. How did this happen?

Sora

It’s part of ongoing long term decline, and it’s not a sudden phenomena. Women are typically less interested in the traditional, typical news, which is politics, economics, finance, business; all of that, women are less interested in overall. But last year, we had some serious events like a war, a federal election. I think those events pushed women away further. And in the meantime, news organizations present news in the same ways that they know how to do best which is just presenting hard factual, impartial news, watchdog journalism, which is great, but women want something different. So in this year’s study, we found that women want more positive stories. And they also want news, rather than the typical watchdog journalism that investigates and investigates abuses of power, they are also interested in journalism that provides solutions. They want more constructive news, more happy stories, and they’re not getting much of that. Another factor is that because news is full of negative and serious news like the war and elections, women typically don’t like that, and they want local news, they want news about wellbeing, lifestyle news. Those news [types] don’t fill much of the space in the traditional news ecosystem. That’s probably the the main reason why women are turning away from news.

Danielle

I suppose the issue for news outlets would become how to incorporate that sort of information into news because traditionally, a lot of those topics are not seen as news.

Sora

Yeah, yeah, exactly. But women and younger people as well are broadening their concept of news. They want more news that is closer to their real life, closer to home. They prefer local news, news that’s relevant to their day to day life. Of course, they’re interested in national news, and they know it’s important. But they also want those micro-level hyper level news.

Danielle

Do you think that the problem is likely to get worse on that gender news gap?

Sora

From the traditional news outlets? Yes, I think so. Because not much has been done to change things. But these women who say that disengaging with news, also they mainly focus on traditional news, so we don’t know whether or not they access alternative news sources, not much of it anyway. And women are, they might not be interested in news per se, but they are very well informed. They have their own source of news and information. They might be accessing alternative sources of information. So I guess, in that sense, the gap could be narrowed. If there are enough quality information sources that are non-news sources, and women access those, then it’s fine. But it’s just that unknown that we don’t really know. And you don’t know the quality of the resources. It is a bit of an unknown.

Danielle

I guess we’ll see with the next survey, we’ll see what the results are. This survey found that social justice issues are avoided, which I found interesting, because they’re often directly relevant to people. They’re the sort of things that will have a direct impact on people’s lives. What do you think publishers can learn from that particular finding?

Sora

You’re quite right. But it’s the news that vulnerable people need the most that are being avoided. And I guess it’s the way it’s presented as well, and the volume. In European countries, the most avoided news topic was the war in Ukraine. And obviously, it’s because there’s too much of it. And they know it’s important, but they get sick of it. I think it’s similar in Australia; what happened was, we had a lot of news about social justice, more than usual. The US and Australia are the only countries where the top topic that people avoid is social justice. Perhaps that is linked to how much, the volume of news and the way it’s being portrayed. 

Danielle

So in a way, it’s about finding different ways of doing news.

Sora

Yes, I think so, finding different ways. I don’t know how to do it as a news organization, but adjusting the volume of news because people, even during the COVID pandemic, when it was at the height of the public pandemic, people avoided news about COVID, because there was just too much of it. That’s like a balancing act where you provide enough information, but not too much.

Danielle

Just moving to misinformation and disinformation. In the past, we’ve seen the eSafety Commissioner warning Twitter about the amount of misinformation and disinformation on the platform. And we know from this report that Australians are struggling to sort of navigate that wave of misinformation. How can we tackle this, particularly with AI now becoming such a feature of the news environment? 

Sora

It’s going to be even more difficult to discern misinformation, even with all the tools and technology like labeling, all those efforts are very important. But at the end of the day, it’s up to the individual to be able to discern misinformation. Australians are not equipped with media literacy, and we know from other studies that we have very low confidence in discerning misinformation, we have high concern levels about it. I think overall, all Australians need to be educated or retrained in their media literacy skills.

Danielle

I suppose there’s an opportunity there for the education system to sort of really take this on board as well and potentially work with the news sector to incorporate that into the curriculum a little bit more.

Sora

Definitely. Finland is a good example where they have media literacy education embedded in all the curriculum throughout school. As you can see from my report, they usually have the highest media literacy, they hardly have any gender gap. They’re very interested in news, they have a very high level of news consumption. I guess that in the long term, that’s how we could improve what’s happening in Australia.

Danielle

We’ve got that issue of news personalisation, where it’s something that editors and news organisations have always done in terms of curating what news is seen and what appears on the homepage. But I was interested to see that people don’t necessarily want that, but they are accessing news aggregators more. How do we balance that? 

Sora

That’s a tricky one, isn’t it? People want news that’s relevant to them, and curated for them, but they’re also very concerned that it might keep them in filter bubbles. That’s how people feel at the moment, that because they’re on social media and digital platforms all the time, they know the risks of being on those digital platforms and relying on algorithms or they’ve experienced it firsthand, so they have a very heightened sense of it and are very worried about it. But they also want convenience. So we asked whether or not they preferred curation by journalists, or by their past consumption, or by their friends’ consumption. And most people prefer the second option, which is their past history. Obviously, that means they want curated news based on their interests and their needs and they don’t want other things to be factored into that. But then, because of the overall digital environment, they’re quite worried about it as well.

Danielle

Will AI play into that? I think it’s one of the areas that a lot of publishers are looking at, using AI to curate news and target audiences.

Sora 

AI could possibly improve the relevance and accuracy of what an individual wants, but it will also raise the concern level as well. It will probably go in both directions. 

Danielle

There’s really no easy answer is there?

Sora

I think for news organisations, it’s so hard for them now to provide news. There’s no simple way to do it.

Danielle

And then, as you said, we’ve got the the polarisation that feeds into it as well, with people potentially being stuck in those bubbles and that heightening issues of polarisation. But Australians still think that public service media is important to society, and they think that at a higher level than other countries around the world.

Sora

That was a good surprise. But even [compared] to countries like Japan, Canada and the UK, where we always thought their public service media are doing a great job, which they are, but Australians value it more than those in those countries, which is quite good news, I think.

Danielle

Why is that? We’ve seen trust in the ABC and The Guardian is up, but then we’ve also seen that people are avoiding news, women in particular are not accessing news. They’re getting it differently. How do we sort of reconcile the two? And is there a reason why Australians value their public service media more?

Sora

There are lots of theories about it, and we didn’t actually ask why in the survey. It could only be speculation, but I guess public service media is, like people’s perception of it is not solely dependent on the news function. If we think of ABC, or SBS, we don’t equate that to ABC News or SBS news. It’s the overall content they provide. We love ABC children programs, and we love the movies and TV shows on it. It’s part of the branding. I think that Australia public service media have done such a great job of providing all sorts of content, not just news, but entertainment content, educational content, language content. I think that overall trust and reliance on those brands is one of the reasons why ours is higher than in other countries.

Danielle

We’ve seen regional news consumption fall as well. It’s a bit sad when you look at the way that the regional news landscape has been decimated since COVID, with a lot of outlets shutting down. Do you think there’s a future for regional news, and what might that look like in such a polarized and online news world?

Sora

It is quite a dire situation, because people who access regional news are the most active news consumers and they trust local news. Local news is so important to many Australians, but because more and more we don’t have enough provision of it, there’s all these gaps in regional areas and that is reflected in the survey, that people do access regional and local news a lot, but not enough, not as much as they would want to. That’s a big problem. But because we know people’s top interest is in local – when we asked what types of news, what kind of what topics do you want the most, they say local news – we know there’s a huge demand for local news. The big problem in Australian regional news is that they haven’t been able to convert that into online. We’re losing regional newspapers, print newspapers, but those audiences don’t have a place online to go to. That’s the big challenge, to provide local news in an online form that people find easy to access and find it accessible. I think that’s really important. And that the moment that hasn’t really happened.

Danielle

Do you think that then plays into the misinformation issue as well, people don’t have a trusted news source to go to and then rumours abound?

Sora

We’re seeing in regional areas where there are no local newspapers anymore, then they have to get local news somewhere. They often turn to social media groups and online sources to get local information and news. And what that does is, they have to use that because they have no alternative, but it really lowers the trust in overall information and news, and if they encounter misinformation, or clickbait, during the search for local information, that will really heighten the concern level of people’s concerns about misinformation.

Danielle

So, the path forward then for these regional producers in particular, do they need to invest a little bit more in their digital presence?

Sora

I think so, digital presence and localized, locally relevant news. In that sense, I guess local news is much broader in terms of the topics people want from local news, things like weather, business information, retail information, local councils, so it’s a much more mixed bundle of information than national news, I think, so they have to provide the depth and relevance in each local area.

Danielle

It’s a big ask, it’s a lot.

Sora

They have one or two journalists reporting on the whole area, so it is a bit of a challenge.

Danielle

Does that mean that we’ve landed on social media, and digital outlets and news aggregators being the answer? Is that right?

Sora 

Well, we see a huge increase in news aggregators to use and search for news, like using search engines for news. I’m not sure if that’s because it’s the answer. I guess it’s what’s available now to news consumers, that’s the easiest way to get news that they want. But we also know that brand is very important, brand trust, because when you search for news, and you find 10 different options, which one do you click on? It’s related to trust – although social media and intermediaries are becoming really important. But at the end of the day, I think it’s the brand trust and brand quality that people are seeking. It’s where people actually access the news. Social media and aggregators are just intermediaries.

Danielle

Just around the findings on paying for news. We’re in a cost of living crisis, are you expecting that people are going to continue to pay for news? Or do you think it’s more likely that that publishers are going to start to struggle as the cost of living really hits?

Sora

Well, paying for news was stagnant for a very long time in Australia, and it started to increase last year. And it went up again this year, even though there was a cost of living crisis and people cancelled a lot. We also saw people who are subscribing to news already, increased their subscription. I don’t think it will, the pain will increase a lot in short term, it will take a very long time to gradually increase. But those who are already subscribing and those who can afford to – and usually subscribers are high income, high education, heavy news consumers – they probably will increase subscriptions which will make up for that loss in audiences. In the long run for the general audience, we also asked, would you ever pay for news, what would make you pay for news, and more than half say nothing. So that is a bit pessimistic that half the people who are not currently paying will ever pay for news. So I think there will be a limit to the increase due to the growth of paying customers, and it will be a very gradual increase.

Danielle 

I found that one really interesting because we’ve gone from a media landscape where people bought the paper every morning, that was what you did, to an era where people expect to get news for free, because it’s online. People expect that they can just access it. News publishers are having a lot of trouble combating that. How do we tackle that and explain to people that if you want trustworthy news, it does have to be paid for?

Sora

That’s a really difficult one, because even in the newspaper era, people did pay for newspapers. But it wasn’t just for news, it was for all the other things like classifieds, inserts and lifestyle magazines, and all of that, included as a bundle. It was like a kind of culture, almost like a lifestyle thing that you pick up the newspapers with all the different sections, and news is one of them. Whereas in the digital space, it’s really hard to bundle all of that and make people pay for it. That’s the challenge. How do you bundle news with other other contents that people are willing to pay for, so that they can have this one stop access? People probably will be willing to pay, but it’s a challenge. How can you provide something like that? 

Danielle 

It’s a lot for news producers to think about. And if I’ve got my timing right, you will need to start preparing for the next survey. Is that right? In a couple of months? 

Sora

Yes, we start in September. 

Danielle

So where to where to from here besides the next yearly survey, are there branches that you’d like to look more into?

Sora

Yes. We would really like to, other than this digital news report, which is much focused on mainstream to traditional news. But we know, even from our study, that people are accessing [and] seeing news from all sorts of different alternative platforms and outlets that are not traditionally news. We would love to do some more research on whether women actually go for news if they don’t engage with traditional news, [and] where do young people go. We’d like to investigate all these emerging types of news platforms and venues so that we understand the audiences better.